The amount of wireless mobile data traffic has increased substantially. According to one study, the global mobile data traffic was about 90,000 terabytes in 2009 and it is expected to increase to 3.6 million terabytes by 2014. A portion of this mobile data would be generated and/or consumed by the mobile operator networks, such as voice, text and other value added services, such as video-on-demand, gaming etc. This would be a significant load on the mobile operator networks, including a radio access network and a core network.
With such substantial increase of the amount of the mobile data, a major challenge that the mobile networks face is the backhaul of data between the radio access network and the core network. The challenge is essentially due to the large capacity and the flexibility needed.